List of objects in scene with counts (verts, faces, tris)?
With some inspiration from the other answers I made an addon to show mesh information.

You can save this link to your addon folder or to somewhere convenient and use the Install from file button in the preferences. As awi's step of using bmesh to calculate the vertices after modifiers are applied takes some time in larger scenes, even without modifiers (a few seconds with a million verts scene) I have displaying that count as an option.

When you enable the addon there is an option to set how many mesh objects are listed (default is 5). The list is sorted by the true vertex count so you can easily see what objects have the vertices. Also large numbers are nicely truncated with k,M,G suffixes to make for easier reading.

Once enabled you can find the Mesh Information panel under scene properties.